Tolerating Intolerance

I have been teaching college undergraduates since 1997. Almost all of them have been nice people and many of them worked hard, but not very many of them were interested in what these days we call "critical thinking." The ones who were willing to work hard did the assigned work and expected that that would be the end of it. When asked to consider opposing ideas, or to make an argument for one position or another, or to evaluate either the validity or the truth of a logical proposition, more often than not they were surprised and sometimes even offended. There was a rule, a common understanding, that I had broken. I think you could even say that, in their eyes, I had broken faith with them. My understanding of what education should be and theirs were very different.

They were also convinced that a kind of soft moral relativism was the proper attitude to have; that making judgments about the beliefs or practices of other people was not nice, and that niceness was a kind of ultimate moral standard. (I remember a bumper sticker from several years ago that read "Mean People Suck": it seemed obvious to me that "mean people" meant those who made judgments about other people. My sense was that all moral categories had been reduced to "nice" and "mean.")

And yet they were doctrinaire about one thing. They had been convinced that the proper moral position was not just to be tolerant of difference, not even just accepting of it, but to be affirming and celebrating of difference. In the otherwise secular and value-neutral university, this was doctrinal orthodoxy. Questioning it was beyond the pale and meant that you did not have the proper "dispositions" to be in the community; even bringing it up in a purely theoretical and hypothetical way ran the risk of one's being branded a racist. Faculty could not be hired, or once hired could be denied tenure; students could be denied entrance to programs or be denied the license or credential they were pursuing.

I describe this not to address the basic issue of whether this is a good thing for the university but, rather, to bring up a difficult philosophical and political question that is implied by this position.

Are all things to be tolerated? All those students who saw themselves as moral relativists quickly withdrew from that position when asked about murder and rape. These were wrong. Period. But the point is not that they were not really moral relativists; the point is that when asked about less obvious examples of questionable behavior, they were deeply conflicted.

I taught people who were on their way to be teachers so the examples we examined were examples from the classroom. "What would you do," I asked, "if you had students in your classroom who were verbally or even physically abusing other students because it was part of their cultural heritage? Boys from cultures where girls and women were inherently inferior? Members of opposing tribes or clans or ethnic groups whose parents had brought their feuds with them when they immigrated?"

Some students had no problem with this dilemma because their attitude was that if people chose to come here they should obey our rules, be the way that we believe people should be. This, of course, is as mindless a position as is absolute tolerance. The students who were willing to grapple with the question, on the other hand, were willing to admit that they were deeply conflicted: on the one hand, they had been taught that all differences were to be celebrated but on the other hand they intuitively realized that such behaviors were unacceptable in the classroom. How to reconcile this?

I raise this because this is a vital and reverberating question in our current politics. To some extent domestically but especially in foreign policy, what is the right position to take toward intolerance and how should that position be put into action?

To put it another way, if a person believes in tolerance toward others, does that rightly include being tolerant of those who are intolerant?

There is a current bumper sticker that says "Coexist" with a variety of religious symbols on it. I think it's accurate to say that most of us in the modern West believe in coexistence, believe in tolerating those whose beliefs and practices we disagree with in the interests of the greater good, the common good.

But what do when confronted by people whose most basic and profound belief is that they are not only right but that those who do not believe and practice the same things deserve to die?

We believe in tolerance, in coexistence. What do we do when we come face-to-face with those who do not?